April 29, 2026. By Abby Sourwine, Center for Digital Education, GovTech.
In response to student feedback, Virginia State University worked with the nonprofit Ed Advancement on a platform that aggregates financial, academic and administrative information into a single interface for HBCUs.
For college students today, navigating the administrative side of their own education can be complicated. In addition to academic obligations, they are expected to navigate a multitude of digital systems to ensure their housing, tuition and courses are in order. In an interview with SmartBrief last month, Intellicampus CEO Joe Abraham put that number between 80 and 120 for many institutions, and he said those systems often don’t communicate with each other.
For students, the result of this complexity has been added stress and missed deadlines. A 2025 national survey of 1,010 college students found 47 percent had missed a critical deadline, such as payment or assignment, because they couldn’t find the right information across multiple systems. Forty-one percent said navigating these systems affected their academic performance. In one preliminary focus group at Virginia State University (VSU), 10 out of 10 students told the nonprofit Ed Advancement that if a single platform had all the information they needed, they would use it on a daily basis.